VOLUME 2, 2006 the Vienna of Hitler and Freud
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VOLUME 2, 2006 The Vienna of Hitler and Freud: An Undergraduate Seminar Course Ian Reifowitz SUNY-Empire State College This essay discusses “The Vienna of Hitler and Freud,” a seminar course that examines the culture of the Habsburg capital in the period from 1867 through 1938, with a particular focus on the years just before and after 1900. The goal of this course was twofold. First, it sought to introduce students to broad historical debates about the nature of Viennese fin-de-siècle culture by having them read political and cultural histories about that society. Then, it asked them to read important works of fiction and non-fiction produced in that society and attempt to assess how accurately these works reflected each of the historical arguments they had previously discussed. This approach can produce fruitful results with well-prepared, motivated students at many different kinds of post- secondary institutions. Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 89 More broadly, the goal of this kind of seminar is for students to gain an understanding of how to study in depth any historical topic or period of time. I sought to develop their analytical skills in examining primary and secondary sources. Furthermore, I encouraged them to look for common themes across their sources that reflect broad trends in a given society and culture. The course was designed to impart skills that will hopefully aid students in any kind of advanced study they might eventually undertake, either in or outside of academia. Course Context and Requirements I offered "The Vienna of Hitler and Freud" as an upper-level (i.e. junior and senior) seminar at Georgetown University in the spring of 1999, although it was designed so that sophomores with a strong background in modern European history could certainly succeed in it. Students needed to have taken at least an introductory survey course in modern European history before this class in order to have the proper context to examine the culture of Vienna around 1900. The course met once a week, fifteen times spanning the semester, for approximately two hours per meeting. Discussions of assigned readings took up the first twelve weekly class meetings. One week midway through the semester was devoted to one-on-one meetings with me to discuss students’ research projects. Students’ brief presentations of their research papers, as well as feedback and questions from their peers, were the focus of the final two meetings. The class consisted of twenty undergraduate students, approximately evenly divided by gender. Students had to read 200-400 pages per week and, in preparation for each meeting, to write a one-page "reaction paper" that asked them to respond to what they had read in an organized fashion. I found that doing so ensured that each student was able to contribute to the discussion because the assignment required them to prepare their thoughts prior to the meeting. This was important because the requirements of the class included significant participation by students during class meetings. Students had to select one of the secondary sources assigned and write a formal 2-3 page analysis of its argument, due the day that book was to be discussed. Each student also delivered an oral presentation, including questions for the class to discuss, on the readings assigned for one of the class meetings during the semester. Starting with the third meeting, each class began with a presentation by one or two of the students; their questions served as a starting point for the broader class discussion of that week’s reading. At the first meeting, students selected the week they would give their presentations. Finally, at the end of the Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 90 semester, each student turned in a research paper (approximately 15 pages) on a topic they chose (through consultation with me) that related in some way to the culture and/or history of the period examined during the semester. In addition to the content-related learning, taken collectively the assignments required students to prepare for, participate in, and lead a serious academic discussion that explored historical and cultural issues in depth, as well as to analyze and critique in writing the work of a historian or historians. Students were also expected to gain skills in conducting in depth research, utilizing both primary (often in translation due to language constraints) and secondary sources, and to explore a topic in detail. Students’ semester grades were calculated as follows: 10% for their weekly one page ‘reaction papers’ (the average of the grades on these during the semester), 10% for their oral presentation of a week’s readings, 10% for the 2-3 page paper on one assigned secondary source, 30% for their general class participation, and 40% for their research paper. (A complete syllabus, which contains minor revisions from the original 1999 version, appears at the end of this article as an appendix.) I structured the seminar in this manner to foster students’ engagement with the material. The assignment of weekly reaction papers, as well as beginning each meeting with student presentations served a particular goal: to have class time consist largely of student-generated discussion rather than my explaining what was important. For this reason I did no formal lecturing. I contributed by choosing the readings to guide the students’ learning. This does not, however, mean that I never directly interjected my own thoughts into the conversation. Typically, I had a few specific themes I wanted the students to explore at each meeting. I often spoke little or at all during the first 80 to 90 minutes of a given meeting, and remained largely silent throughout if the student discussion had in fact covered what I had hoped it would as long as the students kept the conversation going themselves in what I considered a reasonably productive direction. If, however, one or more themes I had hoped they would explore remained uncovered much beyond the halfway point in the meeting, I would wait for a lull in the conversation and introduce a question aimed at moving the discussion in that direction. I tried to do this only when necessary, so that the students initiated as much of the conversation and analysis as possible. I hoped to give them maximum freedom within the structure I had designed. I took this approach for the following reasons. First, if I introduced my themes for the day’s discussion at the outset, it may well have limited the discussion to those themes. During our meetings, students often brought up points that I had not considered, or looked at questions from a different way than I might have. My limiting or narrowing the discussion would likely have prevented Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 91 such productive exploration. I chose the assignments and structured the course, with an authority derived from years of research and study of this society, and students understood this. Nevertheless, I wanted them to feel that they had an active role in determining how they as a group reacted to the materials I had given them. Motivated students respond to being given the intellectual responsibility to guide the course of their own learning and exploration. They also feel a greater satisfaction when they come up with their own insights on what they have read than when the instructor tells them what insights they should have gained. This kind of satisfaction leads to a greater love of learning, which to me is the overarching goal of liberal arts education to begin with. Course Syllabus and Rationale After an introductory meeting in the first week, the following meeting asked students to become familiar with the broader political history of Austria-Hungary during this period (see the Appendix for the syllabus and other course materials). I assigned the bulk of Steven Beller’s Francis Joseph, as well as sections from Alan Sked’s The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire. Beller’s is a highly readable and concise account of the political history of the period that incorporates the historiography up through the mid-1990s. More recently, Robin Okey’s The Habsburg Monarchy has appeared in print, but its length and degree of detail make it more appropriate to serve as a core text in a course on the history of modern Austria-Hungary. I concluded that the Beller text continues to be the better choice to serve the needs of this course, although a more historiographically up-to-date text, if equally readable, would be desirable when one appears in print. Students also read Sked for an opposing view of the broad historiographical question that looms over historians who study the last decades of Austria-Hungary, namely why did it fall? Beller argues that the main cause of the Monarchy’s fall was the political strife among the nationalities, which resulted from the inability and unwillingness of the long-serving Emperor Francis Joseph to democratize the political system in order to grant some form of autonomy and equality to all his peoples at the expense of his own personal authority. Sked, on the other hand, deemphasizes domestic factors and contends that external forces, namely a long war that strained its resources and a final defeat that destroyed its political legitimacy caused the Monarchy to dissolve in November, 1918. This initial reading assignment and the subsequent discussion during this meeting allowed students to gain a broad understanding of the historiographical debates about Austria- Hungary as well as the basic features of that society in the last decades before the First World War. At this first substantive meeting (the second overall meeting) there was no student presentation, and I guided the conversation a bit more than I did at Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 92 subsequent meetings, if only to ensure that the class discussed important historical developments during the period.